The invention relates to a method of segmenting time-sequential images of a picture signal, in which, within an image, the image is split up into regions during its segmentation, and in which adjacent pixels having similar luminance and/or chrominance values are associated with a region.
A method in which segmentation within each image of a picture signal is performed is known from "Image Segmentation Techniques, Computer Vision, Graphics, and it Image Processing" by Robert M. Haralick, Linda G. Shapiro, Vol. 29, pp. 100-132, 1985. The segmentation is performed as a division of each image into regions whose associated pixels have similar luminance and/or chrominance values. In this known method, similar contents of consecutive images are not taken into account.
Another method, in which a different segmentation technique is used, is known from "Region-based video coding using mathematical morphology", by Philippe Salembier, Luis Torres, Fernand Meyer, Chuang Gu, Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 83, No. 6, pp. 843-857, June 1995. In this method, it is attempted to utilize similar image contents of consecutive images. However, this method fails when there is motion in the image contents.